Here are my Cloud Capacity Myths. Please feel free to add more or even better challenge me on these!
- Virtualisation and cloud will allow capacity to be turned up in an instant
- Procurement of capacity is still not instant due to internal processes
- Services and applications still take time to be built and configured even if the capacity is available
- The bottleneck may not be physical capacity, it may be an application bottleneck, the cloud doesn't address that (most bottlenecks are "logical" in my experience)
- When the capacity is turned up - what is the workload that's driving it? Whose fault was it? Without forecasting, measurement and planning one may never know
- Cloud capacity is cheap
- Temptation for ‘heavy’ and inefficient applications to be built due to the perception there that capacity is cheap which will potentially lead to cloud being more expensive than physical hardware
- The cost depends on the underlying physical hardware, if cloud is using slower processors compared to a physical servers then the cost of supporting the application will increase
- There are other costs associated with capacity, e.g. software licenses
- Virtualisation still carries a large overhead - true efficiency is arrived at when services share the same operating system and not just the same hardware
About the author
Team Capacitas
FinOps and AI: Building the Financial Discipline for the Next Wave of Enterprise Intelligence
AI FinOps represents an evolution rather than a replacement of traditional FinOps. It extends the model into a domain where financial, technical, and product decisions are tightly interconnected.
Confidence Under Load: How We Verified AKS Readiness for Peak
How Capacitas verified AKS readiness for peak demand by validating workload performance, autoscaling, cluster capacity, monitoring, and incident response.
Building Cloud Resilience: Lessons from the AWS Outage
Learning from the Latest Outage. Events like this week’s AWS disruption highlight one clear truth: resilience must be designed, not assumed.
Bringing Order to Chaos: A Practical Guide to Chaos Testing in the Cloud
In today’s cloud-native environments, resilience is not optional—it’s critical. Chaos testing has emerged as a key practice for validating system behaviour under failure conditions.